For Christmas I got an interesting present from a pal - my extremely own "very popular" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and my picture on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was totally written by AI, with a couple of easy triggers about me provided by my friend Janet.

It's an interesting read, and really funny in parts. But it likewise meanders rather a lot, and is someplace in between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it's also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at information about me.

Several sentences begin "as a leading innovation journalist ..." - cringe - which might have been scraped from an online bio.

There's likewise a strange, repeated hallucination in the kind of my cat (I have no pets). And there's a metaphor on practically every page - some more random than others.

There are lots of business online offering AI-book composing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I got in touch with the primary executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had actually offered around 150,000 customised books, primarily in the US, because rotating from putting together AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm uses its own AI tools to create them, dokuwiki.stream based on an open source large language design.

I'm not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who developed it, can buy any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody creating one in anyone's name, consisting of celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around violent material. Each book consists of a printed disclaimer mentioning that it is fictional, produced by AI, and designed "exclusively to bring humour and happiness".

Legally, the copyright comes from the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the item is meant as a "customised gag present", and the books do not get sold even more.

He hopes to broaden his range, generating different categories such as sci-fi, and maybe using an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted type of consumer AI - offering AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit frightening if, setiathome.berkeley.edu like me, you compose for a living. Not least since it probably took less than a minute to produce, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound similar to me.

Musicians, authors, artists and stars worldwide have actually expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We need to be clear, when we are talking about data here, we in fact suggest human creators' life works," says Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI companies to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is images. It's masterpieces. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that."

In 2023 a tune featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms due to the fact that it was not their work and they had not granted it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And despite the fact that the artists were fake, it was still extremely popular.

"I do not believe using generative AI for creative functions must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without consent ought to be banned," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely effective but let's develop it morally and relatively."

OpenAI says Chinese rivals utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes industry and dents America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually picked to obstruct AI designers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have actually chosen to work together - the Financial Times has actually partnered with ChatGPT developer OpenAI for instance.

The UK federal government is considering an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize developers' content on the web to assist establish their designs, unless the rights holders choose out.

Ed Newton Rex explains this as "madness".

He mentions that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

"All of these things work without going and altering copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a in your house of Lords, is also strongly versus eliminating copyright law for AI.

"Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening one of its finest carrying out industries on the vague promise of growth."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No relocation will be made until we are definitely positive we have a practical plan that provides each of our goals: increased control for best holders to help them certify their material, access to premium material to train leading AI designs in the UK, and more openness for best holders from AI developers."

Under the UK government's new AI plan, a national data library consisting of public data from a large range of sources will likewise be offered to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump's go back to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that intended to enhance the security of AI with, to name a few things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It stays to be seen what Trump will do rather, however he is stated to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a variety of suits versus AI companies, and especially versus OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everyone from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comic.

They declare that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the internet without their permission, and used it to train their systems.

The AI business argue that their actions fall under "fair use" and are for that reason exempt. There are a number of elements which can make up fair use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it collects training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn't all sufficient to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became one of the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek declares that it developed its technology for a portion of the rate of the similarity OpenAI. Its success has raised security issues in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I truly desire a "bestseller" I'll still need to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the present weak point in generative AI tools for larger tasks. It is full of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so verbose.

But provided how quickly the tech is progressing, I'm uncertain for how long I can remain positive that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are much better.

Register for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the biggest developments in global innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents all over the world.

Outside the UK? Register here.